Robert Rogers’ 1766 Ponteach: or the Savages of America. A Tragedy is the first play published in Britain about specifically North American subject matter by an author born in the American colonies.1 Though the play has been read as functionally about England rather than North America, merely an ‘obvious political allegory … through which Rogers provides a loyalist critique of revolutionary rhetoric’ (Tanner and Krasner 7, 5), I find it impossible to conclude anything other than that Ponteach is inescapably about colonial America and its self-construction. The play’s aggressive efforts to remove Ponteach from realms of mere metaphor humanize him to a specific purpose: only a fully human, complex Indigenous character can communicate the tragedy of the dehumanizing colonial relationship that Rogers reports.
Rogers is best known to history as the great military leader of Rogers’ Rangers, the most successful fighting unit in the French and Indian War of 1754–63. His fame is also partly the result of good self-promotion: he was first the author of an influential Concise Account of North America (which included a reasonably accurate and nation-specific sixty-page description of the ‘Customs, Manners, &c. of the Indians,’ reprinted here as Appendix A), and an autobiographical account of his American military experiences, sold as The Journals of Major Robert Rogers (which included a summary of the successful strategies he employed in training his troops and directing their tactics in battle). Ponteach2 is less well known, receiving only a one-page mention in John Cuneo’s 300-page standard biography of Rogers. While Rogers’ historical documents are widely referenced and discussed, his play has been almost ignored critically, arguably because the play is widely perceived to be only adequate as art.3 The play’s importance, though, is not that it was very nearly the first published American play, or even in its entertainment value, as it was never staged4 and is not well appreciated as a literary text. Its value is as a representation of a political speech act, and though it did not actually receive a production, it attempts to render for the first time for the English-speaking stage a knowledgeable representation of one of the Indigenous cultures of North America.5 More importantly, it asserts for that culture a humanity that transcends eighteenth-century Europe’s often-accepted ideological constructions of innocent noble savages or monstrous and violent mimics of almost-humanity. As Stephen Greenblatt suggests, until the late twentieth century, there was a long-standing tradition of writing and reading Indians as transparent: ‘either as Hobbesian pagans in a state of nature, condemned to lives that are solitary, nasty, brutish, and short, or as mute, naïve, miserable victims, condemned only to deception and enslavement.’ He suggests that modern criticism gives ‘the encounter between Europeans and American peoples a remarkable specificity and historical contingency. The Indians have lost the transparency of allegory, gaining instead the density of historical subjects struggling to come to terms with figures from a perplexingly different culture’ (viii). Rogers’ play makes a very early gesture towards exactly this epistemological shift in its rendering of the Ottawa war chief Pontiac as Ponteach, a complex, articulate human being driven to acts of violence and war both by his own excess ambition and a continuum of personal snubs and cultural encroachments that threaten his family and his community.
Rogers seems to have been moved to the dramatic arts by a review of his Concise Account in Critical Review, which noted that ‘the picture which Mr. Rogers has exhibited of the emperor Ponteack is new and curious, and his character would appear to vast advantage in the hands of a great dramatic genius’ (November 1765). Perhaps in response to such encouragement, Rogers wrote a dramatized version of the most notable individual figure in the broader historical and ethnographic accounts he had published, fictionalizing Pontiac extensively, most blatantly in giving him two sons,6 and having the two sons fight over women, eventually leading to both their deaths.
Rogers had completed only a basic public school education in New Hampshire, however, and the play’s formal structure and relatively accomplished blank verse leave some doubt as to whether his was the only hand involved in its production. Allan Nevins and Howard Peckham both suggest that Rogers must have had the assistance of another, more conventionally educated figure, and Rogers’ personal secretary Nathaniel Potter is the most logical candidate for co-author or editor. Potter had been educated at New Jersey College (Princeton). Nevins calls Potter ‘educated and rather clever, but disreputable’ and provides manuscript evidence that British Superintendent of Indian Affairs Sir William Johnson asserted in 1767 that Potter ‘had been hired because Rogers was so illiterate as to require someone to do business for him’ (102). Though the evidence of Rogers’ own journals and letters seems to contradict Johnson’s assessment, there is little suggestion of rhetorical flourish either. Francis Parkman is correct in the summary that ‘his books and unpublished letters bear witness that his style as a writer was not contemptible’ (1: 162–3). Potter and Rogers had a falling out around 1767, but this would not seem to preclude collaboration on Ponteach. John Cuneo also nominates John Campbell as a possible collaborator (174–7). Campbell was a prolific and competent writer who had also been commissioned by Lord Bute to write a justification of the Peace of Paris, which would have given him a certain amount of detailed knowledge of America, though he had never been there. No author was listed on the title page of the printed text of the play, and though it was uniformly attributed to Rogers upon publication (Nevins 101), some form of collaborative endeavour seems likely.
Even with growing interest in North America and ‘Indians’ by the 1760s, even with the English cult of sensibility in full swing, and even amid the beginnings of the vogue for melodrama on the English stage, Ponteach was ill-received. All evidence indicates that it was never staged, and Rogers’ decision to have actually occur onstage two unprovoked murders and scalpings (by English hunters), several violent deaths, an attempted rape by a priest, and an extended scene of torture (initially including an innocent woman and her breastfeeding child) was something that, according to The Gentleman’s Magazine could be viewed or read only with ‘abhorrence’ and ‘disgust’ (February 1766). Monthly Review was particularly personal in its criticism, calling Ponteach ‘One of the most absurd productions we have ever seen,’ and noting that in ‘turning bard and writing a tragedy Rogers makes just as good a figure as would a Grub-street rhymester at the head of our author’s corps of North American rangers’ (January 1766). Contemporary reviews of all of Rogers’ publications are reprinted in this volume in Appendix C.
In addition to the artistic shortfalls such reviews pointed out, there were some odd historical inaccuracies as well that should be noted. The most significant of these is perhaps the apparently completely fictional story of Ponteach’s two sons, Philip and Chekitan, but a second set of historical inaccuracies comes in the representation of the role of the Mohawks in Pontiac’s Rebellion. As Rogers’ own Concise Account acknowledges, the Mohawks and the Five Nations maintained ongoing hostilities with the Great Lakes Nations. Not only were they not traditional allies, but the Mohawks were a part of the long-standing Covenant Chain that established peaceful relations between the Five Nations and the British, and were at no point part of the rebellion (though the westernmost of the Five Nations, the Senecas, had a vital role). One step beyond this broad slippage lies Ponteach’s representation of Hendrick, styled ‘Emperor of the Mohawks’ in the dramatis personae. The Mohawk leader Theyanoguin was known to the English as Hendrick, but he had been killed in battle in 1755 in the French and Indian War, long before the events of Rogers’ play. In a play that seems in so many ways desperate for the appearance of accuracy, and that offers so much lightly veiled political commentary, such errors might seem surprising, but in fact there are both internal and external reasons for Rogers’ depiction of Hendrick and the Mohawks. The first is fairly simple: the likely involvement of one or both of Nathaniel Potter and John Campbell in the composition of the play. Either man would have known that the tragic subplot of the second-generation Ottawas and Mohawks might appeal to the tastes of mid-eighteenth-century audiences (particularly in the language of sensibility and the elements of the melodramatic), and the star-crossed lovers plot requires families or nations in conflict. Other issues of marketing might also have overwhelmed desires for accuracy: the Mohawks were the Indigenous nation best known to most Londoners, and with their loyalty to the British in the war, they were widely depicted as heroic figures in Britain. A character named Hendrick, in particular, might have been considered to have sure appeal to audiences, given the recognizability of the Mohawk ‘Hendricks’ of the two previous generations. Londoners might have been expected to recall the famous Mohawk ‘King Hendrick’ who was one of the ‘Four Indian Kings’ whose visit created a sensation in London in 1711. English audiences could imagine such a man, because they or their parents might have seen him or his portraits. Adding further complexity is the subsequent slippage in the identity of ‘Hendrick’ in historical accounts. As Barbara Sivertsen has shown, there were actually two different Mohawk sachems who were called Hendrick Peters by Europeans. The two have been conflated by generations of historians, but as Dean Snow has documented, the sachem known to the Mohawks as Tejonihokarawa was a member of the Wolf Clan born around 1660, while the Hendrick Peters also known as Theyanoguin was a member of the Bear Clan born in 1692.
While such inaccuracies preclude Ponteach from being read as a conventionally historical depiction of Pontiac’s Rebellion, the play offers a different kind of insight into Anglo-Indian relationships, allowing a more individuated and human understanding of the types of perceptions and interactions that contributed to what was in many ways the last great stand of the North American Indigenous nations against the westward expansion of colonial settlements. The play at no point asserts absolute historical accuracy, and these sorts of departures from documentable history tend to serve either artistic purposes (as in the presumed audience appeal of a love plot in Chekitan) or political ones (as in the fictionalization of real men to make more explicit what Rogers perceives to be their errors).
Running from the spring of 1763 until the final formal treaty was signed at Fort Ontario on 25 July 1766, the conflict most commonly known as Pontiac’s Rebellion covered a geography from Pennsylvania to Illinois and included more than a dozen different tribes from the Illinois, Ohio, and Great Lakes regions, as well as the Senecas, the Keepers of the Western Gate of the Iroquois Five Nations (though the remaining groups of the Five Nations, including the Mohawks, maintained the Covenant Chain, which affirmed their allegiance to the British). Eighteenth-century estimates suggested that some 2,000 settlers and soldiers had been killed or captured by the end of 1763, though modern historians of the conflict are sceptical: as Gregory Evans Dowd points out, the most-cited source for this number is Deputy Indian Superintendent George Croghan, but Croghan was in London when he made the estimate, and the ‘public and personal papers that he would have had at his disposal do not bring the number anywhere near that high’ (142). Howard Peckham documents a plausible calculation of deaths, with some 450 soldiers killed in the conflict (239), and William R. Nester provides a similarly reasonable calculation of approximately 200 Native warriors killed (279). Regardless of the final numbers of dead on both sides, the conflict was long, wide-ranging, and bloody, fostering tremendous suffering in both settler and Indigenous communities.
As in any war, the origins of Pontiac’s Rebellion are complex and at times contradictory. The long-standing conflict between Britain and France had most recently been activated in the Seven Years’ War, which was fought on European, North American, African, and Asian soil. With reference to the specific events of North America, the conflict is most often called the French and Indian War. Hostilities in the French and Indian War ended for the most part with the September 1760 signing of the Capitulation of Montreal, though it was the February 1763 Treaty of Paris that formally ended the Seven Years’ War and all of its subsidiaries, calling for a ‘Christian, universal, and perpetual peace, as well by sea as by land, and a sincere and constant friendship shall be re established between their Britannick, Most Christian, Catholick, and Most Faithful Majesties, and between their heirs and successors, kingdoms, dominions, provinces, countries, subjects, and vassals, of what quality or condition soever they be, without exception of places or of persons.’ Under the Treaty of Paris, nearly all of the territory previously controlled by the French was ceded to Britain, giving Britain control of all but a very small part of the American territory east of the Mississippi. As George Croghan reported to Sir William Johnson at the time, however, various Indigenous leaders asserted that ‘the French had no right to give up their Country to the English’ (quoted in Dowd 112). This sentiment alone might or might not have led to armed conflict, but, as Rogers’ play points out, the relationship between the Indians and the British was very different from that fostered by the French in previous generations.
The relatively small numbers of French settlers had developed interdependent and widely amicable, if not necessarily egalitarian, alliances and trading and domestic relationships with many of the Great Lakes Nations, including intermarriage. After 1763, British policy instead generally addressed French and Indians as equally conquered peoples. Instead of leaving existing French forts as the generally small trading outposts they had been, the British rebuilt many of them (including the mammoth Fort Pitt), convincing the Indians that the British intended to take over their territory exclusively and permanently. Though the western expansionism implied by such fortifications is one obvious motivation for Pontiac’s Rebellion, population pressures were much less important to Pontiac’s Ottawas and the other Great Lakes Nations (Hurons, Ojibwas, and Potawatomis) than to the Shawnees, Delawares, Mingos, and Wyandots of the Ohio region, which faced constant pressure from the Thirteen Colonies. Still, though the Great Lakes and Illinois Nations had yet to face substantial pressures of colonial expansion, the experiences of the Ohio Nations made clear that the British plan was distinct from that of the French. Differences in administrative attitudes and policies soon became another common complaint and source of racial tension.
Among the British leaders of the North American colonies after 1763, Sir Jeffrey Amherst is perhaps the most emblematic face of the new modes of governance. Amherst was the governor general of British North America from 1760 to 1763, and he made no secret of his distaste for the Indigenous inhabitants of his newly claimed territory, and this was made most explicitly manifest in his decision to cut back on the long-standing tradition of gift-giving. In most of the Indigenous cultures of America, the giving or exchange of gifts functioned as a gesture of respect and communalism. The French had incorporated this tradition into their trading relationships, and regularly made gifts of European goods such as hunting weapons, gunpowder, blankets, clothing, and alcohol (as well as tobacco) to local sachems, who then distributed the goods in their communities as evidence of their status and their ability to negotiate benefits from the French. Though Superintendent of Indian Affairs Sir William Johnson and many of Amherst’s officers in the field pointed out the enormous cultural significance of gifts among the North American nations, and advised against the policy change,7 Amherst read the tradition as mere bribery at best and extortion at worst. He reasoned that ‘we must deal more sparingly for the future, for the now tranquil state of the country and the good regulations you have put the trade under, I can see very little reason for bribing the Indians or buying their good behavior, since they have no enemy to molest them, but, on the contrary, every encouragement & protection they can desire for their trade’ (quoted in Nester 51). To add potential injury to insult, Amherst also reduced the amount of gunpowder that could be traded. This had a doubled negative effect: at the most practical level, scarcity of powder made hunting and thus the sustenance of communities more difficult; this in turn contributed to a larger sense that the Indians were being weakened and disarmed in order to render them vulnerable to future attack.
Though the conflict is named after Ottawa sachem Pontiac, it was the Senecas who sent the first round of war belts, calling the Great Lakes Nations and others to uprising in 1761. Seneca support for war and later for Pontiac was not unanimous, however. Because the Senecas were a part of the Iroquois Five Nations, the sending of war belts constituted a break in the Covenant Chain, the long-standing agreement between the Iroquois confederacy and the British. For this and other reasons, this first round of discontent could not bring the different nations to unified action, but by 1763 two things had changed: the consequences of the handover of territory from the French to the British became undeniable, and a religiously based movement towards Indian nationalism gained great momentum.
In the early 1760s, word spread quickly among Great Lakes Nations of the dream vision of Neolin, known as the Delaware Prophet (of the Wolf Clan of the Delaware Nation). Rogers’ play touches relatively briefly on the specific rhetoric of Neolin, but his historical importance, especially to Pontiac’s role in the conflict, is great. The earliest recorded account of the Delaware Prophet comes in 1761 from a Pennsylvania fur trader named James Kenny, not long after the first of the visions, which Neolin asserted had begun in 1760. The version of Neolin’s vision most closely associated with Pontiac, though, is the contemporary document, the Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy, a French-language account of the Siege of Detroit written in the form of a journal. The Journal is generally attributed to Robert Navarre, a notary and interpreter at Detroit, who had access to both the garrison and Pontiac’s camp during the conflict.8 Navarre’s account of Neolin’s vision is reprinted in Appendix B of this volume.
Neolin claimed a dream in which the Master of Life demanded several changes to traditional practices of worship and domestic life. The account of Neolin’s dream begins with the dreamer’s quest to meet the Master of Life. After eight days of travel, the dreamer is directed to the Master of Life by a woman and then a man dressed in white. The Master of Life tells him, ‘Because I love you, ye must do what I say and love, and not do what I hate.’ In Pontiac’s telling, the Master of Life rejects drinking ‘to the point of madness,’ infighting, polygyny, and adultery, and medicine dances seeking the Manitou, whom he calls ‘an evil spirit who prompts you to nothing but wrong, and who listens to you out of ignorance of me.’ He admonishes the dreamer for dependence on English weapons and trade goods: ‘if ye were not evil, as ye are, ye could surely do without them. Ye could live as ye did live before knowing them … I do not forbid you to permit among you the children of your Father;9 I love them. They know me and pray to me, and I supply their wants and all they give to you. But as to those who come to trouble your lands, – drive them out, make war upon them. I do not love them at all; … Send them back to the lands which I have created for them and let them stay there’ (Navarre 28–30).
The Delaware Prophet conveyed his vision of the Master of Life to several groups across a surprisingly wide geography, but Pontiac was his most influential follower. Navarre’s account reports that the ‘adventure was soon noised about among the people of the whole village who came to hear the message of the Master of Life, and then went to carry it to the neighbouring villages. The members of these villages came to see the pretended traveller, and the news was spread from village to village and finally reached Pontiac’ (32). Richard Middleton documents some of Pontiac’s subsequent role in spreading Neolin’s vision: ‘according to Menominee tradition, he visited the Milwaukee some time in the fall of 1762 or the early spring of 1763 for a grand council, where he introduced the Wisconsin peoples to Neolin’s vision’ (66). Such introductions culminated in his repetition of the story at the critical war council of Hurons, Ojibwas, Ottawas, and Potawatomis near Detroit on 27 April 1763, where, Navarre records ‘they listened to him as to an oracle, and told him that he had only to speak and they were all ready to do what he demanded of them’ (32).
The war council depicted in Act III scene iii of Ponteach may allude to this specific gathering, where a character named ‘The Wolf’ echoes Neolin’s criticism of the abandoning of old ways in favour of European ones:
Our great Forefathers, ere these Strangers came,
Liv’d by Chace, with Nature’s Gifts content,
…
…if some daring Foe
Provok’d their Wrath, they bent the hostile Bow,
Nor waited his Approach, but rush’d with Speed,
Fearless of Hunger, Thirst, Fatigue, or Death.
But we their soften’d Sons, a puny Race,
Are weak in Youth, fear Dangers where they’re not
…
And would you stop it, you must resolve to conquer,
Destroy their Forts and Bulwarks, burn their Towns
And keep them at a greater Distance from us.
Given Pontiac’s importance in spreading Neolin’s word – and the huge persuasive effect that Pontiac’s telling of Neolin’s story is purported to have had in the 27 April war council – it might seem odd that this speech comes directly from a character named ‘The Wolf’ rather than from Ponteach himself in the play. With the play’s intended English audience, however, to have Pontiac speak of a Prophet’s dream vision might risk making Ponteach seem religiously misguided and thus less heroic. Instead, Pontiac has his own dream of the elk, which is never called anything but a ‘Dream’ by anyone but the untrustworthy Catholic priest, who at one point calls it a ‘Vision’ (III ii).10 Ponteach, then, rewrites Pontiac’s apparently genuine belief in Neolin’s vision as an ‘article of faith’ (Navarre 32) as the more conventional dramatic device of the misinterpreted dream, alluding to the importance of Neolin, perhaps, but declining to locate Rogers’ hero as a follower of a human man who could be misperceived a charlatan.
Largely based on historian Francis Parkman’s 1851 volume The Conspiracy of Pontiac, there has long been a sense that Pontiac was a singular leader in the war that bears his name. In fact, though Pontiac certainly led the attacks on Fort Detroit, and certainly did meet with war sachems from other tribes several times in the early 1760s, the evidence does not support a single individual leading the rebellion or creating a coordinated multi-centred plan of attack on British forts. Instead, the attack on and siege of Fort Detroit seems to have inspired other tribes and alliances to act. The timeline is perhaps the most concise way to make this clear. On 7 May 1763, Pontiac made his first attempt on Fort Detroit, as he attended a scheduled council. With him, he brought some 300 men carrying hidden weapons, but an informant had given away his plan, and the attempt was aborted. On 9 May, Pontiac and his allied warriors laid siege to the fort, indicating their seriousness by killing as many British settlers outside the fort as could be found, including women and children. While the Siege of Detroit went on, messengers were sent out to spread word of the action, fostering several smaller – ultimately more successful – rebellions: on 16 May, Wyandots took Fort Sandusky (which had only been built in 1761, under great protest from the Wyandots), killing several British traders and all of the soldiers except the commander. On 25 May, Potawatomis took Michigan’s Fort St Joseph, and two days later Miamis took Fort Miami in Indiana, led by Cold Foot, who had attended Pontiac’s war councils. Another fort in what is now Indiana, Fort Ouiatenon, was taken on the first of June by the tribes of the Illinois country, an unusual case, in that there were no deaths, and Nester and others argue that the local tribes took the fort not out of animosity towards the British, but because they feared retaliation from the Ottawas if they failed to do so (91). The next day, Michigan’s Fort Michilimackinac was taken by a group of Ojibwa and Sauk warriors. This is the famous trick attack where warriors staged a game of lacrosse, drawing an audience of the fort’s soldiers. A ball was apparently accidentally knocked through the open gates, and the warriors rushed after it, grabbed weapons that had been hidden under the blankets of Indian women spectators and traders, and attacked the soldiers, killing approximately half and later torturing some survivors to death. Pennsylvania’s Fort Venango and Fort Le Boeuf were taken on 16 and 18 June respectively by Senecas, and Fort Presque Isle was attacked on 19 June, falling to a band of Ojibwas, Ottawas, Senecas, and Wyandots two days later. A second siege was begun when Fort Pitt in western Pennsylvania was attacked by Delawares and others on 22 June. Fort Pitt was large and extremely well fortified, with walls twenty feet high and sixty feet thick at their base, protected by sixteen cannons, and so could not be taken in a single attack; it was held under active siege until 1 August, when nearly all of the warriors suddenly disappeared from the perimeter of Fort Pitt to meet the forces of Colonel Henry Bouquet at Bushy Run. It was a costly battle for both sides, but Bouquet’s troops officially relieved Fort Pitt on 20 August.
The siege at Detroit continued throughout, receiving word of these victories, much as we see in the very condensed timeline of Rogers’ play. The first attempt to liberate Detroit came on 31 July, when a surprise attack failed, and British soldiers were trapped on a bridge, leaving twenty-three soldiers dead and thirty-eight wounded in what came to be known as the Battle of Bloody Run (the creek ran red with blood).11 As significant as this victory was for Pontiac, however, Fort Detroit still could not be taken, and enthusiasm for what had become a stalemate collapsed. As Rogers’ play depicts, several of the groups that had held Detroit (including Ottawas, Chippewas, Potawatomis, Mississaugas, Hurons, and Wyandots) abandoned the siege through the harvest season of late summer and fall, and some negotiated peace with the British. It was not until 31 October, though, that Pontiac abandoned the siege, negotiating a truce with Henry Gladwin and promising to ask other nations to bury the hatchet as well.
Though violent hostilities became rare by the winter of 1763–64, it still remained to negotiate formal peace agreements. In the summer of 1764, Sir William Johnson negotiated a treaty at Fort Niagara with the Iroquois (most of whom had remained neutral in the war in any case), bringing the Senecas back into the Covenant Chain. That August, Colonel John Bradstreet negotiated a treaty with the Ohios at Presque Isle (though it was later rescinded by Major General Thomas Gage, who had by then replaced Amherst as the leader of British forces in North America), and at Fort Detroit, conducting a treaty with several Ottawa and Ojibwa leaders in September 1764. A second treaty with the Ohios was begun by Bouquet in October 1764 and completed by Johnson in July 1765. Pontiac agreed to a treaty with Johnson at Oswego in New York on 25 July 1766.
In the end, there was no clear victor in Pontiac’s Rebellion. The allied Indigenous nations failed to drive out the British, but the British failed to realize their sense of the Indians as a conquered people. Fatigue and negotiated treaties replaced triumphant victories as the markers of the end of the conflict, and ultimately many circumstances returned to the way they had been under the French before the brief intervention of Amherst’s attempts at conquest and control. Separate from the local treaties and peace agreements that developed between 1763 and 1766 came the English Crown’s attempt to resolve the conflict. News of the Indian victories in the spring and summer of 1763 contributed to the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which first declared, ‘whereas it is just and reasonable, and essential to our Interest, and the Security of our Colonies, that the several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom We are connected, and who live under our Protection, should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such Parts of Our Dominions and Territories as, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us, are reserved to them, or any of them, as their Hunting Grounds,’ and then designated Indian Territory as all land west of the Appalachians to the Mississippi River: ‘And We do further declare it to be Our Royal Will and Pleasure, for the present as aforesaid, to reserve under our Sovereignty, Protection, and Dominion, for the use of the said Indians, all the Lands and Territories not included within the Limits of Our said Three new Governments, or within the Limits of the Territory granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company, as also all the Lands and Territories lying to the Westward of the Sources of the Rivers which fall into the Sea from the West and North West as aforesaid.’ This effort at segregation failed, of course, and colonists continued to press westward. Their resentment at being constrained by Britain was one of the many factors that contributed to the American Revolution.12
Robert Rogers was born in early November of 1731 in Methuen, Massachusetts.13 He is best known, of course, as the leader of Rogers’ Rangers, one of the most successful fighting units in the French and Indian War. His earlier life, though, was marked by accusations of misconduct as a result of what Parkman calls ‘his vain, restless, and grasping spirit, and more than doubtful honesty’ (1: 163). There were several legal skirmishes, but most dangerously, he was tried in New Hampshire in February of 1755 for counterfeiting, a potentially capital offence. Though four of the sixteen men tried in the conspiracy were jailed, Rogers was first held over for further investigation, and then released, apparently as a result of handing over twenty-four men he had recruited as soldiers for Massachusetts to the service of New Hampshire instead (Nevins 42).14 This manoeuvre was protested by Major Joseph Frye, who had paid him to recruit the men for Massachusetts, but Rogers was never prosecuted.
Later in 1755, as a young captain, he was given command of a regiment under Major-General William Johnson, who would later become Superintendent of the Indian Department, and whose knowledge of and respect for Indigenous traditions and cultures may be reflected in Rogers’ Ponteach. Much of Rogers’ work for Johnson and his other superior officers involved scouting and reconnaissance, and this experience (and the associated battles) perhaps qualified Rogers to prepare for the Army ‘Rogers’ Ranging Rules,’ a list of twenty-eight military tactics suited to forest conditions, later published in his Journals of Major Robert Rogers (1765). Rogers invented neither the Rangers (there were three other Ranger companies in 1756, and one as early as 1744 in Nova Scotia), nor the battle techniques he described (some of which had been used by other companies serving in North America), but he systematized and distributed them, and thus they are widely associated with his name. Rogers was made major of the Rangers in His Majesty’s Service in 1758.
Rogers and his Rangers became known for both great bravery and great hardiness, and stories such as those of the two Battles on Snowshoes contributed to their status. Named because the snowshoes worn by Rogers’ men were both unusual and critical to the fight, there were two Battles on Snowshoes, in January 1757 and March 1758. In the first, Rogers’ men were pinned down and vastly outnumbered, but, according to the account of Private Thomas Brown (taken captive in the battle), ‘we Killed more of the Enemy than we were in number’ (quoted in Cuneo 48). In fact, later historians have suggested that Rogers took seventy-four men into battle, with some twenty being killed or captured, while the French forces had perhaps thirty-seven casualties. Despite the defeat, Rogers was praised for preventing a worse outcome. As Captain Abercrombie put it, ‘You cannot imagine how all ranks of people here are pleased with your conduct and your mens [sic] behaviour’ (quoted in Cuneo 51). The second Battle on Snowshoes, in March 1758, was also a defeat, but was even more spectacular in its myth. Rogers’ men leaped from hiding places along a river near an enemy camp to attack a group of about 100 Indians and French soldiers; the enemy retreated, and the Rangers gave chase, only to discover that this had only been an advance party from a much larger group. Only fifty-four of the original 181 soldiers returned to Fort Edward. This battle also gave rise to the famous legend of Rogers’ defying death (and gravity) by sliding 400 feet down the side of an almost-vertical slope to the frozen surface of Lake George. While there is no proof of this event, the rockface he supposedly went down has become known as ‘Rogers Rock.’ Shortly after these events, Rogers was promoted to major. A widely read account of a more successful battle in March 1759 appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine, and is reprinted in this volume as Appendix D.
In his most famous battle (depicted in the 1940 Spencer Tracy film Northwest Passage), Rogers led six Ranger companies under General Amherst to fight alongside James Wolfe in Quebec in 1759. In this conflict, Rogers and his men were sent by Amherst to confront the Abenaki community of Odanak (St Francis), members of which had attacked English settlers to the south. In his letter of orders, Amherst reminded Rogers of ‘the barbarities that have been committed by the enemy’s Indian scoundrels on every occasion, where they had an opportunity of showing their infamous cruelties on the King’s subjects, which they have done without mercy’ (Rogers, Journals 105). The sunrise attack was a success, and the village was burned to the ground, though Rogers’ claims in his Journals to have killed over 200 Abenakis may be overstated. Rogers was also present at the 1760 capitulation of Montreal, and he was sent from there by Amherst to claim Fort Detroit from the French. It was on this mission that Rogers claims in his Concise Account to have first met Pontiac, who purportedly facilitated Rogers’ journey through at times hostile territory.15 This meeting will be discussed further below, but the Concise Account notes, ‘At our second meeting he gave me the pipe of peace, and both of us by turns smoaked with it; and he assured me he had made peace with me and my detachment; that I might pass thro’ his country unmolested, and relieve the French garrison; and that he would protect me and my party from any insults that might be offered or intended by the Indians’ (see pages 180–1, this volume).
After the end of the French and Indian War, Rogers took posts with regular divisions in South Carolina and New York, and went on half-pay after the New York companies were disbanded. During Pontiac’s Rebellion, Rogers served under Captain James Dalyell in the efforts to counter Pontiac’s Siege of Detroit. Dalyell’s party reached Fort Detroit by the Detroit River on 28 July 1763, and managed to enter the fort at dawn. Dalyell advocated a quick attack, but the French habitants appear to have sent word to Pontiac, who had recently moved his main camp to a location some two miles from the fort, keeping the fort and town surrounded at all times. The Battle of Bloody Run took place on 31 July. Dalyell was killed in action, but Rogers survived to endure the siege until its end.
Rogers’ administrative talents were unfortunately not in the league of his military ones: he had failed to make sufficiently detailed agreements for payment of expenses for his Rangers, and many costs had been paid out of pocket. He struggled to gain reimbursement for his expenditures, but made several bad (and possibly illicit) financial decisions in the early 1760s, including pressing litigation about his family lands in Merrimac and a fruitless claim to 25,000 acres on Lake George. Even his own father-in-law sued him for debt. Near the end of the French and Indian War, Rogers was suspected of illegal trading with the same Indian nations his military units were supposed to regulate, earning the wrath of Sir William Johnson. In January 1764, he resigned his commission suddenly and headed to New York, where he was briefly arrested for debt.
In early spring 1765, he travelled to London to seek some sort of fortune: a military promotion (now unlikely in America because of the disapproval of Johnson and others for his ethics and tactics outside of battle); an administrative position in one of the colonies; or funding for his next venture, a search for the Northwest Passage. There was an appetite in London for tales of battle in America, and Rogers was a very minor celebrity in his first season in London, mentioned in The Gentleman’s Magazine, Monthly Review, and The Critical Review in 1765 and 1766. Monthly Review for January 1766, for example, asserted that ‘Few of our readers are unacquainted with the name, or ignorant of the exploits of Major Rogers, who with so much reputation headed the provincial corps called Rangers during the whole course of our late successful wars in America.’
It was during this period that he began his publishing ventures. He published his Journals of Major Robert Rogers and A Concise Account of North America in London in October of 1765, and both received wide acclaim. The Journals offer short, generally factual first-hand accounts of his military excursions from September 1755 to February 1761, written, Rogers asserts ‘not with silence and leisure, but among deserts, rocks, and mountains, amidst the hurries, disorders, and noise of war, and under that depression of spirits which is the natural consequence of exhausting fatigue’ (iii–iv). They also reproduce correspondence and letters of order from Amherst and other leaders. Concise Account is the more entertaining book, a work of highly descriptive historical geography. It is generally typical of this genre in the later eighteenth century, but is notable particularly for its last section, a sixty-page overview of the ‘Customs, Manners, &c. of the Indians.’ This too is a typical element of such a document, but Rogers’ stands out in the detail of its depiction and the fact that he distinguishes customs and traditions among several of the Great Lakes and Five Nations, rather than describing ‘Indians’ as a homogeneous group. Not least because its material so consistently illuminates the circumstances of Ponteach, this section of Concise Account is reprinted as an appendix to this volume, as are contemporary reviews of the publication from Monthly Review and Critical Review.
For a time Rogers was also named as the author of The Diary of the Siege of Detroit, published in 1860 by Franklin B. Hough, but the attribution of this document and the one that follows it in Hough’s collection (‘A Narrative of the Principal Events of the Siege. By Major Robert Rogers’) have long been disputed. John Cuneo cites the Diary as a misattribution in his biography of Rogers, for example, and David Dixon’s Never Come to Peace Again explains, ‘Since Rogers did not arrive at the beleaguered post until later in the siege, the information contained in this portion of the diary clearly came from someone other than the famed ranger. Indeed, Rogers’s account of these events was lifted directly from a letter written by Lieutenant James McDonald to Colonel Henry Bouquet on July 12, 1763’ (299n25). Though Hough’s title page and introduction are unclear on exactly what documents are attributed to Rogers on what provenance, the Clements Library at the University of Michigan lists the original manuscript diary given in the volume as ‘Diary of the Siege of Detroit’ under the authorship of Jehu Hay, a lieutenant at Fort Detroit beginning in 1762 and throughout the siege, who eventually became the last lieutenant-governor of Detroit.16
Much more confidently attributable to Rogers (at least in substantial part) is Ponteach. Rogers’ final publication – also written during his period in London – failed to find a stage for its depiction of the dishonour, violence, and passion of the North American front. Rogers was more successful in his other London endeavours, though. On orders from the king, he was appointed commandant at Michilimackinac, one of the most important and westernmost of British forts in America. Early in 1766, Rogers took up the post and sent men on exploratory journeys seeking the Northwest Passage, but they were unsuccessful (most notable among them Jonathan Carver, whose partly ghost-written journal of his attempt to find the passage became one of the best-known eighteenth-century accounts of North American Indians). Despite his royal preferment, however, Rogers was still disliked by Johnson and General Thomas Gage, the commander of British Forces in America who had replaced Amherst. In his efforts to create an effective administrative and trade system, Rogers continued his relationships with Indigenous nations who were friendly with the British, and developed amicable relationships with local habitants. He went too far, though, when in 1767 he created a plan to allow Michilimackinac and its regions to become a semi-independent ‘Civil Government’ administered by a governor and council, reporting directly to the Privy Council and the king in London. Not least in response to such actions, Gage maligned Rogers at every opportunity, including accusations of war profiteering, gambling, and profligacy. While the various accusations are unproven, the hostility of the relationship was clear, so when Rogers eventually offended his assistant Nathaniel Potter, Potter took an easy revenge by accusing Rogers of secretly planning to turn to the French if his governance plan was rejected. Such a circumstance seems unlikely, given that the French had no standing to speak of in North America, but the accusation was enough. Rogers was tried for treason in Montreal in 1768; he was acquitted of all charges, but was not reinstated to his post at Michilimackinac.
In 1769, Rogers returned to England, hoping for assistance with his debts and repayment of what he felt he was owed, either through the friendship of the king or through the courts. Neither was particularly successful, and Rogers spent extended periods in debtors’ prison. He sued Gage for false imprisonment over the events in Montreal, and the suit was settled out of court: Rogers was returned to a major’s half-pay in exchange for dropping his claim. Rogers also fought for the British in the American Revolution (after having his offer of service to the Continentals rejected by a suspicious George Washington), and returned yet again to Britain at the end of the war. Rogers’ last years were spent in London, still in and out of debtors’ prison and with a reputation for drunkenness. He died on 18 May 1795.
In reading Rogers’ Ponteach, it is essential to keep in mind the distinctions between the fictionalized character of Ponteach and the historical figure Pontiac. The Ottawa war chief Pontiac was a smart man opposed to the British taking control of territory in the Great Lakes region; that much is certain. Beyond that, though, his character and historical significance have long been in dispute. The earliest detailed depiction of Pontiac comes from Navarre’s Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy. The Journal recognizes Pontiac’s leadership at the siege of Detroit, but opens with this characterization: ‘Pontiac, great chief of all the Ottawas, Chippewas, Pottawattamies, and all the nations of the lakes and rivers of the north, was a proud, vindictive, war-like and easily offended man’ (16). Most other information that we have on Pontiac from contemporary sources survives in the communications of British military leaders who are understandably hostile. Rogers’ Concise Account reports that Pontiac describes himself as ‘the King and Lord of the country [Rogers] was in’ and demonstrates what Rogers calls ‘great strength of judgment, and a thirst after knowledge’ (see page 181 this volume). The most famous account of Pontiac, though, comes in Francis Parkman’s rather hagiographic The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada (1870 [1851]), which imagines Pontiac as a great man, a brilliant tactician, and a noble single-handed leader of a vast, complex conspiracy designed to heroically protect an ultimately doomed people. In perhaps his most famous summary line, Parkman asserts that (despite Pontiac’s belonging to a race that Parkman assumed marked him as inherently inferior and ‘thorough[ly] savage’), ‘The American forest never produced a man more shrewd, politic, and ambitious’ (1: 183, 166). Howard Peckham’s 1947 biography is still the most scholarly overview of Pontiac’s life, and Gregory Evans Dowd’s War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations and the British Empire (2002) and Richard Middleton’s Pontiac’s War: Its Causes, Courses, and Consequences (2007) offer the most effectively detailed analyses of Pontiac’s place in the complex historical circumstances of the 1750s and 1760s.
One major note of conflict comes in the question of the singularity of Pontiac’s leadership in the rebellion that bears his name. The most common sense currently is that Pontiac did send war belts and call to council the nations involved in the attack on Detroit, that he likely planned and led those attacks, and that he was the public face of the conflict in the eyes of the British. But rather than individually orchestrating a multi-centred attack, Pontiac more likely sent messengers to other communities to convey the news of the attack, which may have motivated other nations to take up their own arms, leading to a cascade effect. As Richard White has documented, Algonquian societies like the Ottawas did not have a single chief or king in the way that the British imagined (Middle Ground 37), but rather had less conventionally formal systems of leadership organized around an ogema, or ‘most respected man,’ who would lead a grouping of extended families. Ogemas might come together to deal with the concerns of a community or collection of communities, but they did not impose their wills upon their villages.17 On a larger scale, as Peckham documents, there was no king or ‘principal chief’ presiding over the Great Lakes Nations (22). Ojibwas, Ottawas, and Potawatomis were all Algonquian-speaking, and they traded and intermarried in what Dowd calls ‘a fellowship,’ in which they called themselves collectively Anishinabeg (the plural form of Anishinabe), but that identity ‘implies strong senses of commonality and identity, not of political and social unity’ (9).
With those ethnographic caveats and scholarly contradictions in mind, a brief biography is challenging, but perhaps possible despite the lack of first-hand sources from within the Ottawa communities. Pontiac was born circa 1720, but there is no substantive documentation of his life before he came to British attention in the early 1760s. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography speculates that Pontiac might have been among the sixty Ottawas and Ojibwas taken to Montreal to fight the English in 1745; that he might have been involved in the 1747 conspiracy of Orontony, a rebellion near Sandusky, Ohio, over a rapid increase in the prices of goods; that he might have participated in the French and Ottawa attack on the village of Pickawillany in 1752; that he might have been one of the 800–1,000 Indigenous men to help to defeat Edward Braddock’s forces at Fort Duquesne in 1755; and that he was likely one of the thirty warriors from Pontiac’s village at Detroit who served Montcalm at Montreal and Fort William Henry. None of these possibilities can be confirmed. It is not until 1757 that the first printed record of Pontiac appears: Sir William Johnson’s French-language copy of a speech made by ‘Pontiague, Outava chief’ at Fort Dequesne.18
After the 1760 Capitulation of Montreal, Rogers began his journey to Detroit, and this is where Rogers and Pontiac appear to have met. Though some scholars find Rogers’ version of the encounter to be unreliable,19 it offers an intriguing vision of Pontiac and his response to the arrival of the British to the lands around Detroit. The report is included in the Concise Account (see pages 180–2 this volume). Whether the incident is exactingly historically accurate or a self-aggrandizing semi-fiction on Rogers’ part, it offers insight into what the highly knowledgeable Rogers would have thought was a plausible portrait of Pontiac as smart, powerful, and ambitious:
He attended me constantly after this interview till I arrived at Detroit, and while I remained in the country, and was the means of preserving the detachment from the fury of the Indians, who had assembled at the mouth of the strait with an intent to cut us off … He assured me, that he was inclined to live peaceably with the English while they used him as he deserved, and to encourage their settling in his country; but intimated, that, if they treated him with neglect, he should shut up the way, and exclude them from it; in short, his whole conversation sufficiently indicated that he was far from considering himself as a conquered Prince, and that he expected to be treated with the respect and honour due to a King or Emperor, by all who came into his country, or treated with him.
On 27 April 1763, Pontiac called a council to urge Anishinabeg leaders to act to drive out the British, who now claimed the Great Lakes lands as their own. The record of this council comes from the Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy, which reports that Pontiac and the Ottawas met with Potawatomis, led by Ninivois, and Hurons led by Takay (but not those led by Teata, who had rejected the war belt); a total of some 460 warriors were present. The first element of Pontiac’s argument for war seems to have been the highly dubious claim that he had received war belts from the ‘Great Father’ the king of France, asking that he attack the English in preparation for an imminent French return. The Journal records that Pontiac ‘also spoke of pretended insults which he and his nation had received from the Commandant and the English officers’ (20). Finally, Pontiac related the vision of Neolin, the Delaware (Wolf) Prophet, and the demand from the Master of Life that Indian nations rise up to rid their lands of the English.
After this successful council, Pontiac led a party into Fort Detroit on 1 May to assess its defences under the guise of dancing the calumet. Fort Commandant Gladwin had been warned about pending trouble, and he initially refused to let Pontiac and his men in; an appeal to interpreter Pierre La Butte was successful, and both the dance and the spying went as planned. Pontiac then called another council for 5 May at the camp of the Potawatomis. The Journal reports this speech, ostensibly verbatim, and it is reprinted here in Appendix B. He repeats his assertion that the French king seeks their assistance and that the English are disrespectful and trade in cheap goods at high cost. He argues, ‘It is important for us, my brothers, that we exterminate from our lands this nation which seeks only to destroy us … I have sent wampum belts and messengers to our brothers, the Chippewas of Saginaw, and to our brothers, the Ottawas of Michillimackinac, and to those of the Thames River to join us. They will not be slow in coming, but while we wait let us strike anyway. There is no more time to lose’ (196, this volume). The plan was to have Pontiac lead sixty warriors into Fort Detroit with weapons hidden under their blankets, and to have women and children in the fort with hidden weapons as well. Once again Gladwin had been warned, though by whom is still a matter of speculation. All of the garrison’s soldiers were armed, and Pontiac never gave the signal for attack. The Siege of Detroit began on 9 May, with upwards of 900 warriors on the site at the height of the conflict, with Pontiac controlling the French habitants’ entry and exit from the fort, blocking English movement and preventing the restocking of the fort by blockading river access. By 12 May, Pontiac felt successful enough in the siege to coerce the Huron clans who had so far refused to join the action: Teata and Baby agreed under Pontiac’s threats to enter the conflict.
On 25 May, senior members of the habitant community met with Pontiac with the reasonable complaints that their people had been injured, their livestock killed, and some homes burned. They pointed out that supposed requests for voluntary contributions of food to support the allied Indians had at times come with hatchets raised. Pontiac’s response is recorded in the Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy: he argues that he fights partly on behalf of the French, who have signed away their legacy – ‘a thing they could not do to us’ – and whom Pontiac and his people had protected from other attacks in the past. By the end of the meeting, the habitants had agreed to allow Native women to begin to plant corn on their lands. Pontiac’s reputation for rhetorical brilliance does not seem to be misplaced.
The groups maintaining the siege were not always in agreement, however, and several smaller conflicts eventually led to the withdrawal of support by several nations. On 30 May, a group of English captives taken from a ship were tortured to death, to the shock of some members of the camp. In the following weeks, the Potawatomis and some of the Hurons negotiated peace agreements and exchanged prisoners with the English. On 19 June, Kionchamek, son of the leader of the Chippewas (and perhaps the idea for Ponteach’s fictional sons) met in council with Pontiac and other leaders, only to chastize him for unnecessary violence: ‘Like you, we have undertaken to chase the English out of our territory and we have succeeded. And we did it without glutting ourselves with their blood after we had taken them, as you have done.’ The Eries and Delawares are reported to have expressed similar concerns as well as a frustration at the abuse of the habitants, ‘our brothers, the French’ (Journal 172, 174).
Having lost the support of several Indian groups, Pontiac turned to the French. On 2 July, he summoned the heads of all of the local French families and attempted to persuade them to fight. He outlined the victories of the rebellion and listed the forts that had been burned or taken, asserting again, ‘when I began this war it was for your interests as well as ours.’ He argued that in a siege ostensible neutrality was the same as supporting the British, and so ‘there is only one way open today: either remain French as we are, or altogether English as they are. If you are French, accept this war-belt for yourselves, or your young men, and join us; if you are English we declare war upon you’ (Journal 194). A senior member of the French delegation actually produced a copy of the Capitulation of Montreal and argued that – because they were French – they were forbidden to fight the English, but a group of young men leaped up to accept the war belt. The meeting ended unhappily on both sides, and it was the next day that one of the young men took the war belt back to his father, who returned it to Pontiac with the warning that ‘those who have told thee that they are going to assist thee in capturing the Fort will be the first to run away.’ Pontiac accepted the war belt and did not again press the habitants to enter the fray (Journal 196).
The skirmishes continued, including the Indian victory at the Battle of Bloody Run on 31 July, but as the harvest season and then winter approached, most of the Ottawa and Ojibwa supporters trickled away. In late October, a letter arrived from the French Major de Villiers, addressed, as Peckham reports to the ‘French Children,’ advising them that the English and French kings had been inspired by the Master of Life to make peace, and that the hatchet should be buried (236). With no hope of either French or Indian support continuing through the winter, Pontiac lifted the siege.
Though Pontiac was more the instigator of the rebellion than its architect, he ironically gained great prominence in no small part due to the length of the Siege at Detroit, a result of the relative failure of the initial plan of attack compared with the utter devastation of the smaller forts that fell in May and June. After lifting the siege in October, Pontiac travelled to Illinois country, where he continued to encourage active resistance against the British. Because of the profile he had earned in the Siege of Detroit, and because he successfully turned that profile to his advantage in Illinois, Pontiac continued a face (if not a force) to be reckoned with. Sir William Johnson negotiated a formal peace with Pontiac at Oswego, New York, on 25 July 1766. This high profile was as dangerous as it was flattering, however, as Pontiac became embroiled in a series of conflicts with other Indigenous leaders, which led to his expulsion from the Ottawa community on the Maumee River in 1768, and possibly to his death at the hands of a Peoria man on 20 April 1769.
Ponteach does not appear ever to have been staged, and as the reviews in Appendix C demonstrate, the play was not well received when it appeared as a printed text. The Gentleman’s Magazine in particular objected to Rogers’ characterization (‘All the personages of the play may be considered as devils incarnate, mutually employed in tormenting one another; as their character excite no kindness, their distress moves no pity’), the dialogue (‘it cannot be read without disgust; damning and sinking, and calling bitch’), and its shocking content (‘who but would turn with abhorrence and disgust, from a scene in which Indian savages are represented as tossing the scalps of murdered Englishmen from one to the other’). Though the response was negative, however, it is clear that Rogers (and his likely collaborator/s) wrote the play in a style that aimed to meet the tastes of contemporary English audiences. The English-style courtship scenes between Chekitan and Monelia, for example, are highly conventional, echoing everything from the touching but doomed romance of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to the grand assertions of integrity and purity of Sir Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers (1722). Such scenes might well have pleased the typical theatergoer more than they did critical reviewers, and that these are not the scenes noted in the negative reviews might well suggest that they succeeded at least in some degree in touching their intended audience. Similarly, the untrustworthy French priest is a stock figure of English theatre, though his villainy seems both politically specific to North America and much more broadly pandering to anti-French and anti-Catholic sentiments at the end of the Seven Years’ War.
Among such fairly straightforward appeasements of contemporary taste, Rogers also offers a more unexpected appeal to the theatrical fashion of musicalization. Ponteach offers us a war song and dance at the close of Act III. The song is in quatrains made up of closed heroic couplets, and sung to the tune of ‘Over the Hills and Far Away,’ a popular tune that had already been used on stage in George Farquhar’s 1706 The Recruiting Officer and John Gay’s 1728 runaway hit (and repertory regular) The Beggar’s Opera. Farquhar was the first to alter the song’s original lyrics of courtship into a soldier’s song, though his version emphasized the joys of escaping the domestic (‘By getting rid of brats and wives / That scold and bawl both night and day’) in favour of public glory (‘Courage, boys, ‘tis one to ten, / But we return all gentlemen’).20 Rogers rewrites the lyrics again to redirect the song from its associations with Englishmen going into battle to a depiction of Indians going to battle against the English. In a gesture that will be repeated several times in several ways in Ponteach, Rogers makes political points by depicting an aspect of English culture put into flux by the colonial context, and then turned against its English originators.
Though to modern readers such a scene seems obviously out of place in the midst of a tragedy, there were several successful precedents that might have tempted Rogers. In terms of musical interludes in general, Shakespeare’s The Tempest was staged throughout the eighteenth century, and its Act IV masque scene provides perhaps the most immediately identifiable example of interpolated song and dance. Other examples are less expected: in 1664 William Davenant’s spectacular revision of Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth (widely derided by later critics) included songs and dances, ranging from the formally operatic to the more popular, as well as elaborate costumes and mechanically assisted flying witches. The vogue for musical elements is also clear in the mid-eighteenth-century genre of the afterpiece (a shorter play designed to run after the main play and perhaps a musical interlude). Fully half of the afterpieces published in the period employ some form of music or dancing. Rogers is thus not necessarily wrong in his understanding of the tastes of his audience, but it is ironic that it is his efforts to please that result in some of the weaker elements of the play.
One element of popular taste that Rogers’ play could not avoid, given its historical origins, was that ‘box-office receipts suggest that audiences preferred new comedy to new tragedy’ (Staves 87). The Revels History documents that only about 100 new tragedies were staged in the latter half of the eighteenth century (Davies 6: 153). Few were particularly successful, and even fewer are read today. The Licensing Act of 1737 had made staging new tragedies or serious political plays more difficult, and ‘whole seasons passed in the 1740s, 1750s, and 1760s without a new tragedy appearing’ (Bevis 201).21 New tragedies that were staged were often derivatives of classical Roman narratives or plays that located themselves in the exoticized Orient. The earlier vogue for domestic tragedy did not make a substantive reappearance as a genre, though as we will see, the domestic was an important part of the revisionist Shakespeare productions that were extremely popular. The tragedies aimed broadly at high nobility and heroic scope, but there were no new major schools or styles until perhaps the semi-tragic melodrama around the 1770s. Even much better known writers had trouble having tragedies produced around mid-century, as is most notably demonstrated in the well-documented experiences of Samuel Johnson and Tobias Smollett in attempting to find stages for Irene and The Regicide, or, James the First of Scotland respectively. This audience preference, combined with the expense of producing a new stage tragedy, made it substantially less likely that Rogers’ play would be as successful as his other publications.
Perhaps because there is no identifiably conventional tragic style of the 1760s, and because few new plays were being produced in American theatres,22 Ponteach’s tragedy hearkens back to an earlier time. The play echoes the Restoration genre of blank verse heroic tragedy in the modes of John Dryden’s All for Love and Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved in several ways: in the epic nature of the conflict, involving the fate of empires; in the love-versus-honour choice on which the second-generation subplot turns; in the public versus private demands faced by Ponteach; and in the elevated styles and long speeches. Julie Ellison narrows this generic category even more closely, arguing for republican tragedy, making Ponteach into a Roman play in the shadow of Addison’s Cato. In Roman plays, Ellison argues, ‘weeping men – especially the indifferent republican’s tenderhearted son – circle around stoic Romans framed by an imperial, international setting. The Roman republic configures tensions between political decision and indecision, cultural centrality and marginality, law and tears. These texts foreground the need for impersonal law while accompanying its stern tones with the outcry of deep-feeling masculine subjectivity’ (16). Though the play clearly alludes to the values of republican drama, it is a problematic fit with some of the conventions of the form. A typical summary of the genre notes that ‘these dramas present exemplary heroes who embody civic virtue and celebrate republican love of liberty and sacrifice of private desire for the public good. (Occasionally, as in Cato, the protagonists may die, but they do so in order not to compromise their exemplary virtue. Secondary characters, especially women, may also perish)’ (Staves 89). As the next section of this discussion will argue, Ponteach is not an exemplary hero, and he is driven as much by his private ambition as by any desire for public good. Since her argument is based on the definition of Roman drama embodied by Addison’s Cato, Ellison asserts that Ponteach’s (historically accurate and thus required) survival to the end of the play is an exception to ‘the habits of republican drama’ because he cannot commit battlefield suicide. Regardless of which specific elements of Roman drama one chooses to consider, though, Ponteach clearly engages not only the long-standing character and structural codes for heroic drama and its offshoots, but also the old-style forms of verse tragedy.23
Though the genre of Ponteach seems very much of the early eighteenth century, for many readers its language echoes Shakespeare, whose work would almost necessarily be an influence for a less-experienced playwright. Shakespeare’s plays were among the most produced and most popular of the day. As Charles Beecher Hogan documents, approximately one-sixth of all plays staged in London in the eighteenth century were by Shakespeare (2: 715), and in colonial America, Romeo and Juliet was the most-performed play and Richard III was the third most popular. The second most popular play was George Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Strategem, from which Rogers borrows the tune to ‘Over the Hills and Far Away.’ These plays were not all identical to the Shakespeare that we know today: many were cut down, edited for specific emphases, or even entirely rewritten (perhaps most notoriously in Nahum Tate’s happy-ending King Lear). Particularly between the 1740s and 1760s, ‘the new alterations of Shakespeare which prosper … present a domestic Shakespeare who is at the same time eminently patriotic, identified at once with virtuous family life, vigorous trade, and British glory’ (Dobson 187). As Jean Marsden points out, by the later century, ‘managers, actors, and playwrights actively sought to evoke the experience of sympathy, and, increasingly, audiences came to the theater expecting not only to be spectators of distress but to be able to identify personally with the distresses they witnessed’ (29). And so the combination of high heroics and human identification that I will argue is so central to the political implication of Ponteach also links to Rogers’ attempt to meet contemporary audience desires and contemporary ideas of great dramatic art, embodied in the ‘bardolatry’ (Hudson ‘Vexed’ 44) of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century. Throughout the play there is evidence of Shakespeare’s influence: the Romeo and Juliet qualities of the lovers from opposing tribes in Chekitan and Monelia; in Ponteach’s King Lear-like speeches near the end of the play, and in the plot of a parent betrayed by an overambitious and immoral child; in Ponteach’s occasional associations with Othello’s efforts to negotiate a foreign system that both grants him status and constantly holds over him the threat of denying that status. These are only the first of many examples of the importance of Shakespeare to Rogers’ notion of playwriting, dramatic language, the tragic, and the heroic, but they will suffice to demonstrate the debt.
Among all of these disparate authorial and generic models and audience expectations, the most direct literary precursor of Ponteach still seems not to be Lear or Othello or Cato, but Oroonoko, the African prince created by Aphra Behn in 1688 and brought most famously to the stage by Thomas Southerne in 1695. Oroonoko is a prince, tricked into slavery by the slick language and bald-faced lies of an English captain. Though he is later treated well and has his status recognized by his English owner (within the framework of slavery, of course), he is driven by the pregnancy of his wife Imoinda24 to lead a rebellion to attempt to free the next generation of slaves. The rebellion is unsuccessful, partly because those fighting for him lack his noble bravery, and partly because he mitigates his actions because he is unwilling to kill the English randomly. In Behn’s version, Oroonoko fulfils the request of his pregnant wife that he kill her (rather than see her ravaged by the English and their child left a slave); he is then captured, tortured, and dismembered by the English. In Southerne’s version, Imoinda kills herself when Oroonoko cannot do it; Oroonoko then kills the corrupt governor and stabs himself, and the final word is delivered by the representative good Englishman, Blanford:
I hope there is a place of happiness
In the next world for such exalted virtue.
Pagan or unbeliever, yet he lived
To all he knew. And if he went astray
There’s mercy still above to set him right.
But Christians guided by the heavenly ray
Have no excuse if we mistake our way. (V v)
The nobility of the leader of a rebellion, the blank verse form (at least in Southerne’s tragic main plot), the dangers of taking the English at face value (and of using their language), and the problematization of Christianity all recur in the most famous plays of the eighteenth century on African and American Indian rebellion.25 There are obvious differences too, but since the Oroonoko narrative was widely referenced in the eighteenth-century anti-slavery movement, with new dramatic adaptations in 1759, 1760, and 1788,26 its potential as a source text is substantial. Further, the use of Oroonoko as a touchstone in the larger debate on race, humanity, and power provides evidence for the possibility of a Rogers’ seeking some sort of public political effect from Ponteach beyond what he certainly also hoped would be profitable dramatic biography.
While Ponteach clearly tries to appeal to the trends and values of eighteenth-century theatre, it does so from a uniquely historicized position. Rogers’ personal observation of the conflicts between Indigenous and colonial cultures, and his individual interactions with the historical Pontiac, provide a foundation for a distinctly atypical dramatic representation of race, heroism, and violence. Rogers’ play is highly unusual for the time in its sympathetic portrayal of Ponteach and the circumstances faced by his people. Ponteach offers detailed criticisms of colonial policy and very lightly veiled attacks on individual historical figures, such as Fort Detroit commandant Major Henry Gladwin’s apparent embodiment in the acid-tongued Governor Sharp. A critique of dehumanization and cultural eradication can only be powerful, however, if the objects of cultural construction and destruction are established as undeniably human to begin with, rather than accepted as mere ciphers or passive tools for paeans to European enlightenment. As Linda Colley points out, ‘From the beginning of settlement through to the Revolution of 1776 and beyond, the people called Indians were integral to how men and women in early modern Britain perceived that part of their empire that was America’ (Captives 140) and, equally importantly, that this triangulation of identities was critical in the construction of contemporary ideas of nation and the national identity of the Briton.
Throughout Ponteach, ideas of identity, especially in terms of race, are constituted through language, often specifically through discourses of gender. This allows established power hierarchies to be taken as given, insofar as that which is feminized is devalued, even at times rendered less than human. The gendered fluidity given to racial difference by several of the play’s characters shifts male to female and equates Algonquian identities with weakness and failure. Though such parallels were not likely foremost in Rogers’ own mind, the play offers intriguing insights into the relationship between race and gender in the ongoing development of the identity of colonial America.27
The depiction of Indigenous characters in Rogers’ play replicates – perhaps consciously, perhaps not – the convention that widely accepted European constructions of gender function as one of the naturalized foundations for the linguistic and social construction of racial difference. This construction of race, in turn, is the foundation for inappropriate and perhaps dangerous political and social policy in Rogers’ understanding of colonial conflict. The agonies on all sides created by Pontiac’s Rebellion are written here not as collateral damage from military might, but as the inescapable outcome of policy based upon a badly constructed and misperceived identity. Rogers recognizes remarkably early that the futures of several nations are grounded in language, performance, and negotiated fictions. In the early days of not-yet-America, Ponteach reaches conclusions very similar to those that were not explicitly articulated until much later by modern historians like Robert Berkhofer and Richard White: much conflict was the perhaps unavoidable result of ‘the stories these various peoples invented about each other. Both sides had no choice but to respond to the version of themselves the other side invented, and in responding they blurred the line between invention and actuality, between the people who existed in the minds of others and those who acted on their own behalf, between objects and subjects’ (White, ‘Fictions’ 64). The importance of fictions of the Other in times of conflict had, of course, been recognized and dramatized from at least Shakespeare’s history plays onward (and with particular relevance in Othello, for example, and Southerne’s Oroonoko). Not least because of his first-hand experience in such conflicts, however, Rogers’ staging of the performative nature of racialized identity adds another element: in Ponteach, Rogers seeks first to establish the authority inherent in his personal knowledge of North America and its people,28 and to then problematize what he sees as the dangerous misreadings of constructed racial identities by others with less knowledge but more social, political, and economic standing.
Rogers’ dramatization conveys to a broad English audience the political complexity of the Seven Years’ War in America, given Ponteach’s assertion that though the French had been defeated (whom Pontiac had supported in the war and who had supplied the Ottawas with weapons to fight the English), the Indigenous people had not been conquered, and they still claimed sovereignty over the land and independence from the Europeans:29 ‘Think you, because you have subdu’d the French, / That Indians too are now become your Slaves? / This Country’s mine, and here I reign as King’ (I iii). Rogers’ fictionalization of Pontiac and his rebellion is set after the meeting described in Concise Account, in which the Ottawa sachem responded to exactly the sort of gestures of disrespect Rogers warns against in his historical account and that he renders so explicitly in the first act of his play.
More importantly, Rogers writes both historical subjectivity and allegory, recognizing the importance of each for his revisionist version of the grand colonial narrative. As I will argue in the following pages, Ponteach is offered historical subjectivity; the Mohawk princess Monelia is his allegory. The play in some ways functions as a metadramatic embodiment of the pattern of ambivalent colonial mimicry that is so central to Rogers’ depiction: it is a text about the conquest of the Ottawas by the colonists, and as such is, of course, a reflection of the great colonial mythologies of conversion and civilization. But making Pontiac the central consciousness in the depiction of that ostensibly universally recognized narrative leaves it ‘almost the same, but not quite’ (Bhabha, ‘Mimicry’ 126; original emphasis) – a near perfect reflection of the privileged cultural narrative, but one that recognizes its inversion in a clear assertion of ambivalence. As Homi Bhabha explains, mimicry is ‘the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which “appropriates” the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both “normalized” knowledges and disciplinary powers’ (‘Mimicry,’ 126).
Bhabha’s concept of mimicry is typically applied to a situation in which Indigenous writers in a colonized culture mimic the colonizers’ discourse, and it is not conventionally operated by writers from the colonizing culture. That said, Rogers’ Ponteach is clearly written as a document of resistance, existing both within and outside of the dominant British culture. Rogers himself occupied an oddly marginal position in transatlantic British culture: born in North America, he is outside Britain, and yet is often on the fringe of (or even firmly rejected by) agencies of official authority in America. Rogers’ perspective thus originates from shifting affiliative ground, his own voice hybridized by a lifetime spent in sites where no single discourse was entirely dominant, at the fringes of empire, but firmly surrounded by Indian cultures and modes of authority. Susan Castillo terms such figures ‘Creole settlers’ who move ‘between identifications with the European colonizing power and the native, alternately invoking and suppressing the indigenous components of it symbolic economy’ (198).
The ‘double vision’ of Ponteach’s Creole colonial mimicry, ‘which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority’ (Bhabha, ‘Mimicry’ 129), is articulated throughout the play, but in terms of Ponteach’s characterization as historical subject, the play’s first three acts make explicit that his actions are neither simple nor natural, but enforced upon him by the acts of dishonest traders, murderous hunters, and negligent, embezzling administrators. Rogers’ play uses a language of metaphor (the same, but not) to assert categorically that Ponteach is not an example of the natural man or noble savage, but rather the product of a compulsory savagism imposed upon him by the negotiated fictions of a prescriptive culture that, in defining itself as superior, required that resistance be located in acts outside of its social and linguistic control, limiting others to marginal speech and acts of violence or other extremity.
This play, though, is very explicitly not just about Pontiac the man, but at several points directly articulates the connection between the private and public realms between which Ponteach/Pontiac moves in the play and in history. The traders’, soldiers’, and governors’ serial gestures of disrespect in the first act demand a violent response because Rogers writes their actions to be emblematic of the larger political treatment of Indigenous North Americans. The play’s depiction of racial conflicts that are relatively small and personal allow easier comprehension by a European audience trained on heroic drama and conventional tragedy: it is much more possible to identify with humiliation and betrayal on that scale than on the scale of the attempts at cultural eradication that Rogers witnessed in person and records in the play.30 The fundamental implication of Rogers’ staging of the motivations behind Pontiac’s conspiracy is very much the early recognition that the personal is indeed political.
This twentieth-century truism is articulated in eighteenth-century terms at several points through the play, most significantly in the scene where several sachems meet in a war council.31 Ponteach asserts that
’Tis better thus to die than be despis’d;
Better to die than be a Slave to Cowards,
Better to die than see my Friends abus’d;
The Aged scorn’d, the Young despis’d and spurn’d.
Better to die than see my Country ruin’d.
His adviser Tenesco reasserts the necessary equation between private acts of disrespect and larger acts of cultural violence as he notes the need to challenge ‘Their Pride and Insults, Knavery and Frauds, / Their large Encroachments on our common Rights … What calls on us more loudly for Revenge, / Is their Contempt and Breach of public Faith.’ Tenesco ends his speech with, ‘Wrongs like these are national and public, / Concern us all, and call for public Vengeance.’ To which Ponteach’s fictionalized son Phillip tellingly replies, ‘Public or private Wrongs, no matter which’ (III iii).
By politicizing so explicitly the personal experience of Ponteach, Rogers’ play removes itself from the sphere of the constructed noble savage, allowing its protagonist to be bitterly angry at the English; treacherous in his plotting to ‘reign alone’ over all of the Indian tribes once the colonists have been driven off by the confederacy’s collective might;32 monstrous in his willingness to torture the innocent; and greedy in his decision to save them only for future ransoms. Rogers’ Ponteach is not Rousseau’s pure natural man,33 but a complex human character driven to horrific acts by deceits and manipulations great and small that are the more debilitating because, as one of the better-known Indigenous leaders of his day, Pontiac’s personal humiliations are witnessed and borne by all of his people. Had it been widely staged, Rogers’ play might have been the first devastatingly human representation of the colonial agenda to audiences who, more or less accepting the myths of noble generosity or animalized savages needing civilization, did not fully fathom the human costs of their beaver hats and tobacco.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, ethnographic information on Indigenous cultures was fairly widely available in sources ranging in accuracy from the informed first-person accounts of The Jesuit Relations (1610–73),34 for example, in French and Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations (1747) in English, to innumerable scurrilous knockoffs like Ned Ward’s A Trip to New England, a detailed first-person travel and ethnographic account cobbled together from previously published accounts: Ward had never set foot on North American soil. As Benjamin Bissell’s old, but still useful overview of English accounts of North American Indians puts it, ‘Taken together, these works constitute a very large bulk of printed matter, a curious mixture of fact and fiction regarding the Indian’s character, customs, and mode of life: sometimes correct observations exaggerated or misunderstood; sometimes novel theories, showing the writer’s imagination or ingenious fancy’ (12). Though accurate sources were available, more widely read outside of political circles were the necessarily short accounts in popular media like The Spectator and The Gentleman’s Magazine,35 and the generally highly fictionalized and often lurid and extremely violent accounts of captivity narratives from America.36 In between fall contemporary novels such as Charles Jonstone’s popular Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea (1760), in which a section on Sir William Johnson offers both some reasonably accurate information and some egregious exaggeration of Indigenous sexual practice, and Tobias Smollett’s later Humphrey Clinker (1771), with its interpolated captivity narrative. Several less financially successful novels also offered fictionalized accounts around the same time, including the pseudonymous Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American (1767) and Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague (1769).
As Linda Colley documents in her discussion of captivity narratives, ‘Before 1756, most of what British newspapers and magazines printed about America had been brief, factual and overwhelmingly commercial, often little more than a record of incoming and outgoing transatlantic vessels at specific ports. But as the war advanced, far more attention was devoted in papers, pamphlets and books to the American interior, to issues other than trade, and to human interest stories, understandably so, since individual Britons and different varieties of American were now encountering each other at a hitherto unknown rate and degree of intensity’ (Captives 174). Variously accurate information was available to Londoners in the eighteenth century, then, though, given the demands of readership and the political requirements of the colonial mission, only intelligent and devoted readers could reasonably be expected to have substantive knowledge of North American Indian people and the specific political and military actions underlying the economies of trade and colonialism between North America and Britain. Rogers’ Journals, the Concise Account, and even Ponteach benefited from and contributed to a surge of interest in the lives of various types of Americans around the time of the Seven Years’ War, when troops from Britain (and often their families) were sent to North America in substantial numbers. Under these circumstances, in the late 1750s, ‘this vast territory and all its complex dangers came to seem to Britons at home infinitely more real and absorbing’ (Colley, Captives 161).
Even with the much clearer historical picture available to modern readers, part of the challenge of discussing Ponteach is this problem of reading Ponteach (and Pontiac). It is dangerously easy to allow the character to slip into archetypes of the noble savage. For Marilyn Anderson, for example, Ponteach speaks ‘wisdom based on an intimate knowledge of nature’ (236), and embodies ‘all of the virtues of the noble savage, [and so] is set up as a model for white Americans to emulate … [since] according to the criterion for heroic dramas, someone had to be representative of the very highest of virtue and honour’ (226, 228; original emphasis). In contrast, Laura Tanner and James Krasner argue that the view of Ponteach as a hero, noble and tragic, is actually based only on the first act, and that in fact even other characters recognize him as petulant, self-absorbed, and dangerously misguided in his ambition. This seems to me a better, though still not fully nuanced sense of Ponteach’s characterization. Tanner and Krasner, however, go on to use this insight to argue that the play is written only as an allegory: a warning on the nature of rebellion in the days preceding the American Revolution, with Rogers a ‘political playwright, lampooning American revolutionary leaders as crafty, two-faced savages, trying to rob the king of his fairly gained land’ (17). The problem of this reading of Ponteach is that in neither the play nor Rogers’ historical publications is there any substantive evidence that he had the literary talent for a cultural critique so subtly inlaid that it was universally missed by contemporary readers and reviewers. And it seems hugely problematic to assume that a play engaging almost exclusively Native North American cultures, written by a man who knew Pontiac and had recorded concerns about his mistreatment, is significant merely as a volley between Whig and Tory in London. Given the play’s tone throughout, I can see no way to argue that the ‘intensity of Rogers’ condemnation of Ponteach demonstrates the fury with which Whig revolutionary rhetoric was attacked by Tories’ (16). It is true, though, that the character of Ponteach becomes increasingly unattractive as the play goes on, driven by a series of small snubs to press his confederacy to great violence and what would be enormous losses, and condoning the on-stage torture of even the wife and babies of the villain Honnyman until he is reminded that they will bring a large ransom at the end of the conflict. Susan Castillo notes this change as well, though she too attributes it more to Rogers’ political experience than to his sense of Pontiac, arguing that Rogers ‘is ventriloquizing the character of Ponteach in order to enact some of the dilemmas of Creole subjectivity that he himself had encountered … and the transformation of Ponteach from noble statesman to treacherous bloodthirsty savage mirrors Rogers’s own shifting allegiances and his increasing inclination towards the British view of the American rebels as the embodiment of chaos and anarchy’ (222–3).
While any play by a writer so consistently pulled in different cultural directions might be expected to reflect the sort of multiple cultures of reference that Castillo and Tanner and Krasner point out, Ponteach’s representation of a real, widely known and politically important Indigenous leader cannot be written off as significant primarily as English anxiety in disguise. Questions of constructions and performances of identity are, however, extremely important here. The Ponteach of Act I certainly is noble, and speaks with dismay at the distinction between word and act that he perceives in the ‘false, deceitful, knavish’ British (II ii). He has been unable to construct any consistent identity on which to base negotiation because, the play suggests, North Americans and Britons maintain incompatibly distinct understandings of the relationship between public and private identity. It is not just that national identities and languages are different, which of course, forms the most basic obstacle to communication and coexistence; it is that the very conception of identity is a product of nation. Rogers’ representation of British identity in the conflict is a reinscription of Mandevilleanism, set up to commend honourable public appearance regardless of private virtue. Private vice has public benefit for Rogers’ hunters, traders, and colonists, but that private vice is also one of the roots of violence in the Indigenous/colonial relationship. Perhaps by virtue of practical necessity for the sort of early colonists Rogers depicts here, that which is valued is nationally self-serving, regardless of conventional ideas of honesty or virtue; the latter qualities have become merely reassuring linguistic touchstones without further implication.
As Honnyman’s Act I speech makes clear, Rogers draws the colonial British identity as one that manipulates private wrongs such that they disappear in the absence of their publicity: if no one knows, there is no crime. In response to Orsbourn’s anxious query after they have shot and scalped two Indian hunters, ‘d’ye think this is not Murder? / I vow I’m shock’d a little to see them scalp’d,’ Honnyman replies, ‘It’s no more Murder than to crack a Louse, / That is, if you’ve the Wit to keep it private … as they live like Beasts, like Beasts they die.’ This leaves Orsbourn ‘content; my Scruples are remov’d. / And what I’ve done, my Conscience justifies’ (I ii).37 Honnyman advises Orsbourn to ‘conceal yourself’: both the man and the evidence of his actions. The word ‘conceal’ is repeated several times in this scene: Honnyman warns Orsbourn, ‘conceal yourself, and mind your Eye’; after the murders they ‘must conceal the tawny Dogs’; and after covering them with brush, ‘There they will lie conceal’d and snug enough’ (I ii). Honnyman and Orsbourn thus seem to affirm a convention of concealment and deceit among at least certain types of British settlers. This accepted disparity of appearances and actuality among the colonists leaves Ponteach’s Ottawas vulnerable because they expect equation, at least until they become ‘poisoned by the infection of our Foes’ (III iii): ‘Whose very Language is a downright Lie? / Who swear and call on Gods when they mean nothing? / Who call it complaisant, polite good Breeding, / To say Ten thousand things they don’t intend, / And tell their nearest Friends the basest Falsehoods?’ (III i). With the exception of Ponteach and Philip, both described as contaminated by English values, Rogers’ representatives of the Great Lakes Nations are purported to speak honestly and directly and to expect the same of others, assuming that they are judged and valued upon their acts and the words that represent them: ‘I call no Man bad, till such he’s found, / Then I condemn him and cast him from my Sight; / And no more trust him as a Friend and Brother’ (I iv). Ponteach depicts its Ottawa and Mohawk cultural identities as ones in which ideal self relies on a congruent relationship between public and private identification.
The play also individualizes the Ottawas’ and Mohawks’ struggle to engage the Europeans’ contradictory construction of identity and its destabilizing effect on their own perception of identity and relationships with each other. Ponteach’s second son Chekitan, for example, proclaims effusively his love for Monelia, but the Mohawk princess replies, ‘Hoh! now your Talk is so much like a Christian’s, / That I must be excus’d if I distrust you.’ Chekitan is horrified that she would ‘compare an Indian Prince to those / Whose Trade it is to cheat, deceive, and flatter’ (III i), but his ability to communicate has been contaminated. This leads to his immediate willingness to accept the word of his duplicitous brother Philip because Chekitan is unwilling to see any ‘Indian Prince’ in these English terms. And this culturally infused lapse of communication is what leads to the destruction of the second generation of Ottawas and Mohawks in Rogers’ imagining.
In this crucial exchange that we see the fatal implications of the partial naturalization of Europeanness in the second-generation Ottawa and Mohawk characters. Without thinking, Chekitan has come to embody colonial ambivalence: he despises the Europeans and their dishonesty, yet emulates their patterns of romantic speech and their inherent iteration of gendered identity. It is reminiscent of what Bhabha terms ‘the White man’s artifice inscribed on the Black man’s body. It is in relation to this impossible object that emerges the liminal problem of colonial identity and its vicissitudes’ (‘Remembering’ 117). Here, Chekitan’s contamination of identity performs double duty. First, it radicalizes his relationships upon purely racial lines, rendering him vulnerable to his treacherous brother, and thus contributes to Ponteach’s military defeat; and second, it prevents reproduction and regeneration, driving the lovers apart because they can no longer presume to speak the same figurative language.38
The foreboding sense of The Wolf that each generation has been weakened more than the last is confirmed:
We’re poison’d with the Infection of our Foes,
Their very Looks and Actions are infectious,
And in deep Silence spread Destruction round them.
Bethink yourselves while any Strength remains;
Dare to be like your Fathers, brave and strong,
Nor further let the growing Poison Spread. (III iii)
Not just for Ponteach, then (himself ‘infected’ with deceitful ambition), but for all of the allied sachems, the fear of loss of control of identity is definitive. The young need to emulate not just their literal fathers, but also myriad preceding generations, with ideas of self and nation established long before every interaction required mediation by the ‘version of themselves the other side invented’ (White, ‘Fictions’ 64). Nation is no longer about territory, history, or family: even nations often traditionally in conflict are united for survival ‘while any Strength remains.’
Ponteach’s first appearance in the play follows the shocking scene of the hunters Honnyman and Orsbourn murdering and scalping two Indians to steal their load of furs, justifying the act with the argument that ‘It’s no more Murder than to crack a Louse’ (I ii).39 These scenes can be interpreted in different ways, of course, but though I find Julie Ellison’s discussion of Ponteach often persuasive, I cannot agree in any way with her reading of the opening scenes ‘exposing the crimes of French and English traders and settlers against the Indians’ as ‘low comic scenes’ (90). It seems to me that Ponteach’s tragedy begins from its first moments, and to read it otherwise is to trivialize the most historically detailed and accurate (and angry) section of the play. The play calls for the events of Act I scene ii, as well as later murders, scalpings, and the torture of an innocent woman and her breastfeeding infant, to occur on stage rather than off. Staging these scenes of violence would render their physical quality as sickening as Honnyman’s philosophy and its consequences, and there can be no surprise that the next scene establishes a direct and simple contrast between the cursing, overconfident English military leaders and the idealized Ponteach of the play’s first act. Ponteach’s response to Colonel Cockum’s and Captain Fisk’s insults (whose more horrific human and economic implications have been established in the first two scenes) is
So ho! Know you whose Country you are in?
Think you, because you have subdu’d the French,
That Indians too are now become your Slaves?
This Country’s mine, and here I reign as King;
I value not your Threats, nor Forts, nor Guns;
I have got Warriors, Courage, Strength, and Skill.
Colonel, take care; the Wound is very deep,
Consider well, for it is hard to cure. (I iii)
This assertion of dominion is only a lead-in, though, for the next increment in the play’s movement from private encounters between private citizens, to semi-private military encounters, and finally to public political exchanges between Ponteach and the three governors of the colony: Sharp, Gripe, and Catchum. Rogers’ allegiance in the latter scene is obvious in names alone, and his Concise Account accuses those promoted above him of exactly such ignorance. But the slights move beyond private morality as the governors embezzle the king’s gifts to the sachems, and then the sachems’ gifts to the king, until their own greed has left the chiefs insulted and vulnerable to Ponteach’s calls for rebellion, and their nations at war. Ponteach comes to stand in both for the plight of the devalued individual in revisionist colonial systems of hierarchy and for the ‘doomed Indian’ stereotype that would be so widely referenced in the nineteenth century; the difference between Rogers’ portrayal and those typical of the eighteenth century is that Ponteach is shown to be complicated, human, and respected by a fellow warrior even as that warrior depicts his end.40
Though both the play and eighteenth-century English culture in general tend to assume that women are to be excluded from political public discourse, it is not just Ponteach to whom Rogers gives a split significance. The Mohawk princess Monelia is certainly rendered a passive, typically feminized object that men desire and over which they do battle, but she is also significant in much more emblematic ways. Of course, the myths and metaphors surrounding colonist-colonized sexual relationships are myriad, from nations figured as naked women awaiting plunder by the colonial master to the dark-skinned rapist attacking white women who stand in for European or colonial culture. There is also a conventional narrative of European men preventing barbaric colonized men from mistreating women, which Gayatri Spivak summarizes as ‘White men are saving brown women from brown men’ (296), and finally the Pocahontas tradition of the Indian princess who falls in love with a European man, which Peter Hulme suggests uses romance narratives to assert ‘the ideal of a cultural harmony through romance’ (141). Elements of Ponteach conflict with the larger cultural myths of colonialism in their articulation of a slightly distorted version of a narrative widely assumed natural and true. Much to the same effect, Rogers rewrites interracial sexuality in a way that allows Monelia in particular not only to stand in for America in the larger project of colonialism, but also to embody the selectivity of consent in the ostensibly collaborative systems of trade and exchange among colonists and Indians.
As Ania Loomba has observed, narratives of romantic consensuality frequently parallel trade: colonial trade ‘is projected as a transaction desired by both parties, an enterprise mutually beneficial and entered into via the exercise of free will’ (134). Loomba’s examples come from colonial India, but a nicely parallel study is offered in Sylvia van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties, which documents in a less metaphorical way the links among trade and romantic partnership in cases where sachems of various nations married their daughters to Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders in order to cement trade benefits. Such cases suggest that mutually beneficial visions of colonialism may be fictionalized through narratives of romantic alliances, but that those fictions are also based on historical actualities. Ponteach, though, asserts a coercive nature in intercultural trade: in Act I, two Indian hunters are murdered and scalped because Honnyman and Orsbourn are unsuccessful hunters but still desire profit through trade; a second man is cheated when a European trader gives him alcohol, uses a weighted scale, and takes advantage of different systems of quantification; and Sharp, Gripe, and Catchum cheat the Ottawas as a group of both goods and good will by skimming both sides of exchanges of gifts of respect. In these scenes, Rogers does not appear to object to the idea of colonialism as a potentially mutually beneficial trade relationship, but he does seem to object to the ignorance and short-sightedness behind such greed. Rogers observed at first hand the effects of cheating traders and of corrupt officials who opted to ignore the fact that colonial trade (and the peace that it helped to maintain) depended upon mutualism: both sides must benefit from trade (though not necessarily equally), or there is no benefit to the Indians in allowing colonists access to their traditional resources. Ponteach does not suggest that trade inevitably leads to coercion and retaliatory violence – Rogers benefited too much himself from cross-cultural trade to make such a case – but his play makes clear the need for some sort of balanced reciprocity in line with both established Indigenous traditions and traditional trade among Europeans. Throughout the series of scenes in Act I in particular, Rogers legitimizes the case for rebellion as he depicts a complete disregard for expectations of reciprocity and informed consent. The relationships are neither mutually beneficial nor, because they are based on violence and deceit, consensual.
The same tactics are used in the scene between Monelia and the French Roman Catholic priest. He has earlier attempted to initiate a sexual transaction through the language of romance and seduction that Hulme identifies (and that parallels the exchanges of gifts and statements of friendship of the governors). When circumstances take away the time needed to claim Monelia by seduction, the Priest resorts to brute physical force, much like Honnyman does to claim the furs he desires. And when the attempted rape is interrupted, the Priest attempts to impose a blatantly falsified system of reason, naturalism, and balance in God’s will (rather like the supposed exact rightness and balance of the traders’ scales): ‘I have a Dispensation from St. Peter / To quench the Fire of Love when it grows painful, / This makes it innocent like Marriage Vows; And all our holy Priests, and she herself, / Commits no Sin in this Relief of Nature: / For, being holy, there is no Pollution / Communicated from us as from others’ (IV ii). Even under its conventional anti-French, anti-Catholic cover, this scene replicates symbolically the economic and political relationships that have been set up in Act I. Once again, the elements of the narrative are entirely typical – corrupt French priest, beautiful maiden, last-moment rescue – and yet it is not the same. This is first because Monelia is rescued by Chekitan, which gives the Native man the qualities of virtuous heroism that Britons conventionally imagined in themselves and in their staged representations. Locating heroic virtue in Chekitan emphasizes the absence of such qualities in the British colonists in the play, a point that is pressed even closer to home by the fact that the action of the French priest is aligned so explicitly to the earlier acts of the English that the scene becomes one of equation, rather than differentiation of the two European nations and their relative values.41
Rogers’ play uses metaphors of rape and gender consistently (though not universally) to translate the threat of cultural violation into a form that English audiences might be expected to understand more easily. Such metaphors can be read as a two-step aid to identification: the articulation of Indigenous identity in the play depends at times upon the conventionalized vulnerability of the feminine, and the idea of an identity eradicable by force is rendered through metaphors of rape. This is, of course, not a new set of connections in colonial imagery, even in the eighteenth century. Ponteach’s metaphors of sexual vulnerability fall into alignment (both perfect and skewed) with long-standing conventions of personifications of North America as a sexually vulnerable Indigenous woman, most memorably in Theodore Galle’s 1580 engraving America (reprinted here, page 57).42 The alignment is perfect in the assumed powerlessness of the not-European, not-male, but skewed in that images like America were not, at least initially, expected to suggest abuse and eradication, but rather potential for germination, in ideas of conversion, illumination, and economic expansion. Rogers’ play implies that those naïve if noble goals have led not to an expanded age of enlightenment, but to something altogether less noble.
In Ponteach, the threat of subordination is quite consistently framed in gendered terms: those who are disinclined to be brought to battle in the name of small, hugely emblematic acts of disrespect and betrayal or by arguments of avenging the deaths of a few with the deaths of the many, are described by the battle-ready men as ‘womanish’ and ‘unmanned.’ When Chekitan suggests that reason must rule over passion in matters of war, Philip accuses him of being ‘a very Woman in thy Heart.’ Chekitan retorts, ‘Is it all womanish to reconsider / And weight the Consequences of our Action, Before we desperately rush upon them? / Let me then be the Coward, a mere Woman / Mine be the Praise of Coolness, yours of Rage’ (II ii). Every character uses a language of assumed weakness in femininity, and such language appears even in unexpected places: the lover Chekitan uses it to ironize Philip’s view of war, and later to communicate his fear of being ‘unman’d’ by love. Similarly, the monstrous villain Honnyman is allowed a sympathetic moment as he fears he will have to witness the torture and murder of his children, but until he is ‘unman’d’ by the thought that ‘Dear Tommy too must die’ his response is to prohibit his good wife from prayer, concerned that his captors will ‘say Religion makes us all mere Women’ (IV iv). In this similarity between Philip’s speech and that of the worst of colonists, it is, of course, possible that such echoes are simply the effects of an inexperienced writer, failing to differentiate the speech patterns of different characters. But given that Philip and Chekitan do explicitly discuss the significance of this feminized language to their own identities, the potential complexity signified by its use seems plausibly significant. We may see in characters on both sides of the conflict the conundrum that Julie Ellison points out in Anglo-American modes of masculine sensibility: many men who mocked women for their emotional excesses ‘wrote at times in the pathetic vein themselves, read and admired the literature of sensibility, and, all told, were able to justify their own emotionalism while rejecting the emotional displays of women. A man could have his sensibility, in other words, and despise it too’ (20).
Citing Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ellison sets forth a foundational premise that ‘effects fundamental to the genres of sensibility are organized by gender and race’ (7).43 As Edward Said and others have similarly noted, there is a long-standing association of femininity and weakness with the racialized Other (figured as East in Said’s analysis), and masculinity and strength with the West. In the speeches cited above, however, Rogers has both the colonist and colonized cultures make the same equation, demonstrating the absorption of the colonists’ valuations of both gender and race by the Ottawa and Mohawk men. This in spite of the likelihood that both Rogers and the Indigenous men he knew would almost certainly have been familiar with nearby communities such as the Huron, who had a partially matriarchal political and familial system. As in so many representations of colonial transculturation, though, the mimicry is ambivalent: the very hostile Philip accepts the characterization despite his hatred of those who make it (using the language of power as it is used by those who devalue and disempower him), while Chekitan who, as we have seen, has absorbed other modes of European language, both accepts and rearticulates that formulation in an example of the slightly distorted way in which the colonized repeat the colonizers’ discourse. His speech reflects a version of the gendering of racial identity that is ‘almost but not quite’ European (Bhabha, ‘Mimicry’ 126; original emphasis) as he infuses reason and consciousness into that which is presumptively passionate and reactionary, creating space for the same possibility of rearticulation in the parallel construction of race in colonial discourse.
And though powerless in the broad movements of the play, women are at the centre of every action – they are, as Chekitan observes, ‘the Tie, the Centre of the Whole’ (V iv). Philip betrays his brother and murders the Mohawk prince and princess Monelia and Torax because his brother has sold as a slave a woman whom he would like to have kept once he ‘saw her and instantly loved her.’ Chekitan initially argues against Ponteach’s plan to go to war without the Mohawks because it will risk alienating him from his beloved Monelia; he then leaves Monelia alone in the forest so that he can lead a team in war (instead of his more qualified brother) because Philip tells him that this is the best way to protect Monelia. The French Priest betrays Ponteach’s plan to the French in part because he is angry that Chekitan has thwarted his attempt to rape Monelia; and even Ponteach sees himself as constantly in service to the Fates, which are gendered female here.
Certainly, heroic drama, tragedy, and republican drama all tend to depend upon such roots to some degree, but here the central role of women – their vulnerability and the desire for revenge they can foster – is not just about establishing masculinity through the defence of femininity. What Rogers foresees as the broad outcome of the North American conflict is to some degree emblematized in the figure of Monelia and in her violent death in a struggle for the succession of power. Despite the historical problem of locating the metaphor for Indian vulnerability in a Mohawk woman,44 Monelia’s body does function in the play as a fairly straightforward metaphor of the body politic. As a character, Monelia owns no discursive strategies to counter her relegation to dehumanized object and geographical metaphor (whose presence forces others to act, even if only to claim possession), and her psychic and physiological resources are presumed available for consumption. Even in sympathetic European accounts like that of Rogers, indigeneity as identity is performed defensively, enforced by an increasingly dominant European presence.
History always diverges from its accounts, of course, and in fact the British were much more successful at negotiated settlements than in violent conflict with the Great Lakes Nations, but Ponteach is like so many contemporary representations of indigeneity (even the sympathetic ones) in its fostering of popular perceptions of the idea of the Indian. Had his play been produced, Rogers might reasonably have expected it to be influential in some degree. As Colley shows, though many North American colonists’ direct experience might have led to a ‘gut fear and dislike of Indians,’ Britons’ understandings of North American Indians were still being developed in the 1760s: ‘On the British side of the Atlantic, things were different. Overwhelmingly preoccupied for so long with European enemies, and substantially ignorant of Indians – as of much else about the land across the Atlantic – many Britons at home held understandably to a wider spectrum of attitudes’ (Captives 161). Rogers’ play strives to establish the humanity and human range of temperament and experience among the Ottawas, the Mohawks, and other nations, perhaps contributing to what Felicity Nussbaum calls the ‘inconsistencies and confusion … characteristic of racial discourse’ (139) in the eighteenth century.45 Even with his efforts at individuation, however, conventions of constructed identity are concurrently interrogated and entrenched by Rogers: even as he points out the errors of perceptions of identity and the tragic outcomes of a political strategy based on misconstruction, his play cannot help but contribute to the mythology of the doomed Indian, driven to presumed extinction by failures to communicate effectively through performative identity. As K. Anthony Appiah puts it for the modern context, ‘Between the politics of recognition and the politics of compulsion, there is no bright line’ (163).
The metaphor of Monelia suggests that Rogers is to some degree aware of devaluatory metaphors being imposed around him in the service of colonialism. The particular metaphors that Rogers invokes in his play most consistently are those that render Indigenous men weak through a language of feminization or ignorant through a language of savagery, confirming the presumptive universal positive of Christian European masculinity. Judith Butler has argued in the specific terms of gender and sexuality that the distinctions between public and private or personal and political are socially functional fictions, constructed to substantiate the status quo, such that even the most ostensibly private and personal acts are scripted to some degree by compulsory ideology and social convention.46 She notes that ‘as an intentionally organized materiality, the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditional and circumscribed by historical convention. In other words, the body is a historical situation, as Beauvior has claimed, and is a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a historical situation’ (521; original emphasis).
Rogers’ metaphors of race and nation in both Ponteach and Monelia function in much this way.47 To varying degrees among its representations of different characters, the play is one of perhaps only a few instances where the eastern North American Indigenous body of the eighteenth century can be understood as constituted by discourse and its performative embodiment: the audience of English readers and imagined viewers can be expected to have no first-hand knowledge of the identity represented on stage. Pontiac the man, of course, existed and struggled with social demand; Ponteach the character creates Pontiac as a linguistic construction. In Rogers’ mediated representation of recent history, the raced construction is often articulated in the language of European ideas of marginal femininity, such that the naturalized or unmarked qualities of the feminine inform disempowered difference. The character of Monelia suggests this relationship most specifically, but the texts’ links among the language of the feminine and the language of race are both articulated by and directly affect the other characters too, from Tenesco and The Wolf, to Ponteach, Philip, and Chekitan.
And as the near-rape and eventual murder of Monelia demonstrate, Ponteach is right to attempt to manage through both speech and action the metaphors of intercultural negotiation. Throughout the play, he attempts to force his conversations with the governors into metaphors of brotherhood, friendship, and even paternalism. Ponteach calls the English ‘Brothers,’ and pledges to treat them as ‘Friends and Brothers’ (I iv), but remembers with ironic fondness the French colonists who ‘Call’d us their Friends, nay, what is more, their Children, / And seem’d like Fathers anxious for our Welfare.’ And despite the mistreatment of his people, he is even willing to ‘call their King my Friend, / Yea, and honour and obey him as my Father … would he keep his own Sea, / And leave these distant Lakes and Streams to us’ (II ii). This might seem straightforward, even uncharacteristically submissive for Ponteach, but as Richard White documents, the balances of power implied by these relationships are not as direct as modern readers might assume. In many of the surviving historical documents, ‘the fictional identity of brothers was accepted by both sides, but the meaning of that identity, “the firmest bonds of Love and Friendship,” was an American, not Algonquian construction … For the Algonquians, fraternity was a more neutral relation than paternity … fraternal relations were relations of equality, but of all the kinship terms of Indian diplomacy, brother seems, except for cousin, the one least fraught with mutual obligation.’ Still, these questions of brother, father, uncle, or cousin are crucial, as ‘each side had to agree on its metaphorical identity, on the fictions that would govern negotiations. Once established, images became part of larger reality and certain images of the Other demanded certain responses regardless of what the Other actually said or what concessions the Other offered’ (‘Fictions’ 68–71). White cites speeches by Wyandot chief Tarhe to suggest the Indigenous metaphor of fatherhood (for which Ponteach is willing to settle in defeat) is ‘not a stern patriarch; a father was a generous friend’ (83). Still, the father can demand respect and deference. Ponteach reaches this point, however, only after he attempts to construct the relationship in terms of other metaphors such as the more equal and at times violent fraternity. For example, White notes that ‘the [next generation] Ottawa chief Aguishiway meant to elevate the Americans in standing when he told Anthony Wayne that he did not consider him a brother but rather a friend. Even as the Americans and confederated Indians killed each other, they addressed each other as brothers’ (69).
The familial metaphors that Rogers cites thus again both illuminate and problematize the types of relationships that might be possible. Rogers’ audience assumes that it knows what these metaphors imply, but the instability and unreliability of their presumptively universal knowledge of family ultimately affirms instead their cultural ignorance and the dangerous ramifications that assumed knowledge can have in culturally mediated conflict with those who are almost the same, but not quite. Much in the same way that White describes nineteenth-century diplomatic councils,
the middle ground was a realm of constant invention that once agreed upon by both sides, became convention. The central and defining aspect of the middle ground was a willingness, born of necessity, for one set of people to justify their actions in terms of what they perceived to be their partners’ cultural premises. In seeking to persuade others to act, they sought out congruences, either perceived or actual, between the two cultures. The congruences arrived at often seemed – and, indeed, were – results of misunderstandings or accidents. Indeed, the explanations offered by members of one society for the practices of another often were ludicrous. This, however, did not matter. Any congruence, no matter how tenuous, could be put to work and take on a life of its own as long as it was accepted by both sides. (66)
This ongoing process of definition and self/other identification is always in masculine terms, ever attempting to redress the creep of devaluatory metaphors of feminization, because outside of those relationships one of the only two other options is to be womanly – like Monelia, obedient, threatened, nearly ruined by representatives of European Christianity, and finally, violently dead. Or they can become enemies, which is, of course, where the relationship ends up, leaving both the Mohawk king and Ponteach holding only the dead and dying bodies of their children and the future they are written explicitly to warn against.48
Ironically, though, not one is dead at the hand of the English: Monelia and her brother Torax are stabbed by Philip in the name of revenging himself on Chekitan, who discovers the murders, killing Philip and then himself in a telling rage:
There is no Kindred, Friendship, Faith, or Love
Among Mankind – Monelia’s dead – The World
Is all unhing’d – There’s universal War –
She was the Tie, the Centre of the Whole;
And she remov’d, all is one general Jar. (V iv)
After both fraternal and romantic affiliation have been destroyed, there is nothing left but a war that is pointless because it cannot serve kindred, friendship, faith, or love. The world as colonized by the English is so changed that the next generation of Ottawa and Mohawk leaders end in a cycle of self-destruction, overwhelmed by the example and control of the English into a dissipated identity.
As early as Act I, Ponteach eloquently summarizes the elements of the colonial relationship that will lead to the contamination of identity that constitutes the play’s tragic end:
Indians a’n’t Fools, if White Men think us so;
We see, we hear, we think as well as you;
We know they’re Lies, and Mischiefs in the World;
We don’t know whom to trust, nor when to fear. (I iv)
The actual killing does not have to be done by the English – the cultural chaos they have created is enough. Of course, Rogers himself likely killed dozens of Indigenous men on one side of the French and Indian War, and served in battle with hundreds more on the other side. Ponteach doesn’t deny Rogers’ own acts of brutal violence, but it does seem to suggest that he recognized more of their implications than did many soldiers. His play uses the universalized identifiability of the sexual, physical, and social vulnerability of femininity to allow European audiences a glimpse into the position of the Indigenous people of North America, to render on a human scale the enormous acts of cultural violence carried out around the French and Indian War and in the smaller-scale, but equally destructive conflicts among settlers and Indians. And by allowing Ponteach to be both brilliant and monstrous, both defeated and autonomous, Rogers demonstrates the fallacy of the mythologies that were being marketed in Europe to justify the privileging of settlers’ interests over those of established Indigenous populations.
The play ends as Ponteach’s forces are being defeated in battle and Tenesco tells him that he must retreat with them or face alone ‘the Fury of a conquering Foe.’ Ponteach’s final speech begins with a tragic Lear-like cry,
Will they desert their King in such an Hour,
When Pity might induce them to protect him?
Kings like the Gods are valued and ador’d,
When Men expect their Bounties in Return,
Place them in Want, destroy the giving Power,
All Sacrifices and Regards will cease.
Neither the play nor Ponteach ends there, though, in the posture of tragic defeat and powerlessness demanded by most North American settlers and some Britons. Ponteach then calls to the fields and streams, fountains and trees,
I am no more your Owner and your King.
But witness for me to your new base Lords,
That my unconquer’d Mind defies them still;
And though I fly, ’tis on the Wings of Hope …
Britons may boast, the Gods may have their Will,
Ponteach I am, and shall be Ponteach still. (V v)
Rogers’ dramatization of Pontiac’s life thus refuses to end with the submission that might have pleased British and American audiences, affirming the rightness of the colonization or extermination of those driven by revenge to act against what they have perhaps convinced even Ponteach himself is God’s will. Instead, Ponteach lays claim to individual agency and begins his plans for ‘more Sons, fresh Troops … and other Schemes of future Greatness,’ no longer willing to collaborate with either European power in the destruction of Indigenous autonomy, but planning to act against both.
In the end, of course, the historical Pontiac was only sporadically successful, but the rebellion that bears his name was one of the last major challenges to British colonialism in eastern North America. Rogers rejects both noble and savage ideological constructions of Indigenous identity and creates a dramatization of a fellow great military leader that is human and powerful. Rogers’ Ponteach embodies the tragedy of his people in such a way that an inattentive reading can make it all seem personal and petty, with the deaths of hundreds of European and Indigenous people caused by wounded pride and ignorant ambition. But Rogers asks his audience to see Ponteach not as he was misread by fools like Cockum and Frisk, Sharp, and Gripe, but as the personal face of a political act, where acts of violence and degradation are all both ‘public or private, it matters not.’ As a survivor of the war himself, Rogers tries to show London audiences the human face of the North American pawns at the centre of the Seven Years’ War between England and France. In Ponteach, Indianness is both granted historical specificity in the figure of Ponteach and a metaphor in Monelia. And when these two characters are grouped with Chekitan and his ambivalent relationship to colonial culture, it is possible to read their (written) Indianness as performance whose function is both to give specificity to those typically rendered merely symbolic, and in a similarly critical gesture, to expose colonial and European performance as itself savage, violent, and spiritually and economically corrupt, embodied by violent men deliberately reinterpreting both law and policy set by perhaps well-meaning but ignorant men abroad. It is perhaps no wonder that the play was not embraced in its day. It has much, however, to say to us.
Robert Rogers, engraved by Thomas Hart, 1776 (William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan).